Aristotelean comedy according to Cooper, 1

I am fascinated with the academic side of comedy, as this previous post hopefully demonstrated. So this post (or series of them) won't be funny or humorous, but more about how philosophers think about comedy linguistically. I'm just an interested spectator, not a researcher myself but, hopefully this motivates you the reader to explore this interesting topic yourself! 

We start with Aristotle's Poetics, which is a philosophical discussion of drama (especially tragedy) as it relates to epic poetry and stage play dramas. Several academics have conjectured that Aristotle also wrote a second volume concerning comedy (remember the Aristotelean dichotomy drama is either tragedy or comedy). My source shall be Lane Cooper's 1922 book, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy with an adaptation of the Poetics and a translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus. To quote from its preface:

As the Poetics of Aristotle helps one to understand Greek tragedy and the epic poem, and, if employed with care, modern tragedy and the serious novel, so, it is hoped, the present volume will help college students and others to understand comedies ... have indeed included everything I could find in Aristotle, in his teacher Plato, or in his successors, that might aid us in reconstructing his views on comedy.

In the section "A lost Aristotelian discussion of comedy", Lane says:

It is generally believed that Aristotle included in his writings or lectures a systematic treatment of comedy ... evidence in the Poetics, references in his other works, evidence in other writers who refer to him, and general probability, favor the view that he discussed the subject in more than passing fashion in a written record. ... It is generally agreed that the loss of any discussion of comedy by Aristotle is a very serious one to students of literature.

The question is: if there really was a "lost" Aristotelean treatment of comedy, can we deduce from other sources what it might have said? A significant source of information for Lane Cooper's book is, as mentioned, the Tractatus Coislinianus. According to wikipedia, this is an ancient Greek manuscript outlining a theory of comedy in the tradition of Aristotle's Poetics. Some scholars believe it is the work of a commentator on Aristotle's theory of comedy, some that it's notes or sketches (written by Aristotle or a student of his) of the lost second section of the Poetics, and some believe that it's a later work, perhaps by Theophrastus (the successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic school). While the Tractatus Coislinianus is significant, it is not primary for Cooper's analysis. The primary source is Aristotle's Poetics.  

 I quote from Cooper's section "Fundamental demands of Aristotle":

According to Aristotle, in every drama there arc six constitutive elements, to each of which the poet must give due attention. These are

1. plot;
2. ethos or moral bent (shown in the kind of choices made by the personages of the drama);
3. dianoia or "intellect" (the way in which the personages think and reason, their generalizations and maxims, their processes in going from the particular to the general or from the general to the par- ticular, and their efforts to magnify or to belittle the importance of things);
4. the diction, the medium in which the entire story is worked out by the poet through the utterance of the personages;
5. melody or the musical element in the drama (including the chants of the chorus, individual songs, and the instrumental accompani- ment);
6. "spectacle" (all that appertains to costume, stage-setting, scenery, and the like).

The composing dramatist obviously does have to attend to these six elements, and the list, as Aristotle correctly observes, is exhaustive. It would be the same for a comic as for a tragic poet.

That's all for now. More in a later post. 

Linguistic theories of humor, 3

This series of (unfunny) blog posts will attempt to distill parts of certain articles (see part 1 and part 2) on "humor theory" into something interesting and intelligible to someone like me without a degree in English. No joke, it's harder than you might think to abstractly explain humor from the perspective of a linguist (which I'm definitely not). This part will discuss Victor Raskin's semantic script theory.

We use the references from part 1. Some, such as Krikmann [K06], regard Raskin's theory as a refinement of incongruity theory (discussed in part 2), while others regard it as a separate theory.

Agree or disagree, there is no question in my mind that the most interesting aspect of Raskin's theory is that he claims his theory can characterize what makes a joke funny.

“Ideally, a linguistic theory of humor should determine and formulate the necessary and sufficient linguistic conditions for the text to be funny” - V. Raskin

This is something lacking in the previously proposed theories. We'll try to delve into his theory in more detail below.

But first, who is this Victor Raskin? Is he a failed comedian who got a PhD and escaped into academia? I have no idea. According to wikipedia, Raskin was born in 1944 in the Russian town of Irbit, which lies about 1200 miles (2000 km) due east of Moscow. He got his Ph.D. in "Structural, Computational, and Mathematical Linguistics" from Moscow State University in 1970. About 3 years later he emigrated to Israel, and 10 years after that to the US. He is now a distinguished professor of linguistics at Purdue.

Raskin's theory, the first formal linguistic analysis of humor [R79], is nicely explained in Abdalian [A05] and Krikmann [K06].

Raskin believed that certain cognitive structures are stored in our mind along with some "common sense" associated words/phrases describing this structure. Roughly speaking, this is the context of a conversational topic. For example, if "marriage" is the cognitive structure we associate to it words such as "husband", "wife", "happy couple", "loving couple", "father", "mother", "home", and so on. If "plumber" is the cognitive structure we associate to it words/phrases such as "water leak", "broken toilet", "pipes", "plunger", "man in a workman's uniform", and so on. Raskin calls such a structure, along with their typical narratives, a script.

Following Krikmann [K06], we summarize Ranskin's theory as follows:

A text can be characterized as a joke if both of the following are satisfied:

• The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts.
  
• The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite in some sense.
  

The two scripts with which the text is compatible are said to overlap fully or in part on this text. To my understanding, this is a more precise and rigorous version of Incongruity Theory. This doesn't diminish Raskin's work, just places it in context.

Example 1: I don't know where I heard the following joke which mixes a doctor-patient script with a frog script.

A naked man with a frog on his head stands in an examination room in front of his doctor. The doctor gently touches the frog. It seems to be stuck where it is.
Doctor: What's the problem?
Frog: I need you to get this man off my butt.

Linguistic theories of humor, 2

This series of (unfunny) blog posts will attempt to distill parts of certain articles (see part 1) on "humor theory" into something interesting and intelligible to someone like me without a degree in English. No joke, it's harder than you might think to abstractly explain humor from the perspective of a linguist (which I'm definitely not). This part will discuss incongruity theory.

We use the references from part 1.
*
Roughly speaking, the idea explained in my how-to books on joke writing is you need a setup and a payoff. The payoff should be incongruous relative to the setup. This is the basic idea behind incongruity theory. It is more general than that (eg, it explains the humor of some word puns), as we'll try to explain below.

Historically, the theory seems to have first arisen in the 1700s and 1800s in the writings of various philosophers (Francis Hutchenson, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant) and poets (James Beattie).

A precise version of this theory can be given in terms of pragmatics, which is (roughly speaking) the linguistic explanation of the rules of conversation and dialogue). Specifically, we recall Grice's cooperative principle.

Cooperative principle: Make your contribution as required by the accepted purpose of the conversation in which you are engaged.

This is often broken down into 4 components [A05].

• Maxim of quality: Your contribution should be true.
  
  In particular, don't say what you believe is false, and don't make a statement for which you lack adequate evidence.
  
• Maxim of relevance: Only make statements relevant to the conversation.
  
  
• Maxim of manner: Only make concise, clearly expressed and easily understood statements.
  
  In particular, Avoid obscure or ambiguous statements. Be brief and avoid over-explanation and/or repetition.
  
  
• Maxim of quantity: Be as informative as required.
  
  In particular, don't omit necessary details. Conversely, don't give unnecessary details or provide more information than is required.
  
  

In other words, when conversing, we try to be correct, relevant, clear and concise, and informative.

A joke, according to the incongruity theory of humor, is the description of a conversation or situation that violates one of Grice's maxims of cooperation. to paraphrase Krikmann [K06]: A joke is assumed to involves two different planes of content (sometimes called 'frames of reference,' 'isotopies,' 'schemas,' or 'scripts.'). These two contexts are mutually incompatible, but also include a certain common part which makes the shift from one to another possible. When
another interpretation that has so far remained hidden is found, a feeling of surprise and satisfaction arise, causing the reaction of laughter.

Example 1: A joke of Steven Wright fits into this (I'm going on memory here, so the words may not be exact):
"The other day I used spot remover on my dog. He disappeared."
The setup explains the first "plane of content": somehow, something was spilled on his dog's fur and he's trying to clean it off. The payoff
explains the second "plane of content": His dog is named Spot and we heard "spot remover" (a cleaning product) but what he said was "Spot remover." On the other hand, superiority theory would explain we are laughing at the dog owner for not knowing what Spot remover meant.

Neither of these theories (at least, as I've explained them) work to explain humor very well. Just because you violate one or more of Grice's maxims doesn't mean you are funny. While it does provide an observational language in which we can discuss jokes, it fails to define "funniness" in a precise way. In the next post, we look into a theory due to Victor Raskin [V79] which at least attempts to be even more precise.

Linguisitic theories of humor, 1

This series of blog posts will attempt to distill parts of the following articles on humor theory into something interesting and intelligible to someone like me without a degree in English. No joke, it's harder than you might think to abstractly explain humor, from the perspective of a linguist (which I'm not). This part will discuss superiority theory.

Here are the references we'll use:

[A05] A. Abdalian, Why’s that funny? An extension to the semantic theory of humor, Swathmore College, Linguistics Dept thesis, 2005. 32pp.
[H92] C. Holcomb, Nodal humor in comic narrative: a semantic analysis of two stories by Twain and Wodehouse, Humor: International Journal of Humor and Research 5 (1992)233-250.
[K06] A. Krikmann, Contemporary linguistic theories of humour, Folklore 33(2006)27-58.
[C22] L. Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy: with an adaptation of the Poetics and a translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus
Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1922.
[R79] V. Raskin, Semantic mechanics of humor, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 325-335.
(In 1985, Raskin published a book of the same title, which I’ve not read.)


Another good reference for this topic is wikipedia’s Theories of Humor.

At some level, (verbal) humor involves an unusual interpretation of the meaning of a conversational communication. A joke is a non-bona-fide humorous verbal communication, where by bona-fide we mean a communication with usual, information-bearing, serious, sincere meaning. The mental state in which we humans give meaning to something is referred to as propositional attitude. For example, if I claimed "my dog can paint my house," you would know that is false. Not because you are an expert on dogs (and if you are, assume for this example you aren't), nor because you are an expert on painting houses (again, if you are, assume for this example you aren't), but because you have enough of a familiarity with dogs and a familiarity with house painting that you "know" my claim is false. The idea we will take in these posts is that generally get by in our day-to-day lives by using out propositional attitudes towards things, as opposed to insisting on careful scientific, logical reasoning. Careful reasoning takes time and effort, while propositional attitudes are often based on commonly accepted (possibly mistaken) attitudes.

What does John Cleese say?
One of the funniest people ever, John Cleese has given a number of talks on creativity and has emphasized the importance of humor in this regard. He says to be creative you need:

1. Space
   You can't become playful, and therefore creative, if you're under your usual pressures.
   
2. Time
   It's not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.
   
3. More Time
   Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original, and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.
   
4. Confidence
   Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.
   
5. Humor
   The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
   

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

What does Aristotle say?
The known parts of Aristotle’s Poetics discusses a theory of drama, at least of tragedy. (Only tangentially related to the current topic, and worthy of a separate post, is the conjecture that Aristotle wrote a "lost" volume of the Poetics on comedy - see Cooper [C22].) Aristotle introduced the Superiority Theory of humor. Very roughly speaking, the idea is that each joke has a “winner” and a “loser” and we laugh at the loser to feel better about ourselves. This theory of humor explains those (sometimes offensive) jokes pointed against some person or group, typically on political, ethnic or gender grounds [K06].

Example 1:

Woman A: Who was that gentleman I saw you with last night?
Woman B: That was no gentleman, that was my husband.
- old vaudeville routine (with a gender reversal)

In this case, the theory says the husband is the "loser." By laughing at him we experience joy because we feel superior.

Example 2:

Wife: I'd like to go somewhere I've never been before.
Husband: Try the kitchen.
- Henny Youngman

In this case, the wife is the "loser."

Some [A05] believe that Aristotle’s commentary also foreshadowed Incongruity Theory (developed in the 1700s and discussed in a later post) and Release of Tension Theory (developed by Freud in the early 1900s and discussed in section 1.2 of Abdalian [A05]). Related to both Release of Tension Theory and Superiority Theory is Koestler's theory of comedy (for example, Krikmann [K06] discusses this). These three theories can be categorized as "psychological theories". One weakness of the Superiority Theory is that it's too general and vague for predictive purposes [A05]. For example, it doesn’t help to tell us which jokes are funnier than others or why. This is one motivation for exploring other theories of humor.